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Hacking Nondeterminism with Induction and Coinduction

By Filippo Bonchi, Damien Pous
Communications of the ACM, February 2015, Vol. 58 No. 2, Pages 87-95
10.1145/2713167
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Hacking Nondeterminism with Induction and Coinduction, illustration — Credit: Zeitguised

We introduce bisimulation up to congruence as a technique for proving language equivalence of nondeterministic finite automata. Exploiting this technique, we devise an optimization of the classic algorithm by Hopcroft and Karp.¹³ We compare our approach to the recently introduced antichain algorithms and we give concrete examples where we exponentially improve over antichains. Experimental results show significant improvements.

1. Introduction

Checking language equivalence of finite automata is a classic problem in computer science, with many applications in areas ranging from compilers to model checking.

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